Il faut se moquer

July 9, 2014

1. As with, say, colour perception, reports on the direct experience of feelings are necessarily veridical. E.g., you cannot report (in good faith) that you are experiencing fear, while not in fact being afraid.

2. This experience reveals that fear is real. One needn't go looking for fear in the world, as one would go looking for bigfoot or quarks. This is just not what we have in mind when we attribute reality to certain things.

3. I experience love.

4. God is, by definition, love.

5. Therefore, God is real.

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Issue will be taken, of course, with step 4, as having a stipulative character. I am taking it from 1 John 4:8, but others will look to other biblical passages and to other religious traditions to say that God is an anthropomorphized being of some sort, or a theriomorphized one, or a many-headed chimera: in any case, a conscious agent, not a feeling.

But here one might also note that any virtue or feeling at all can be, and often is, anthropomorphized: justice, beauty, purity, etc., have all been represented as human beings in the history of art, and a future historian or a Martian anthropologist would be forgiven for inferring, for example, that late-modern New Yorker-New Jerseyans follow a cult around the goddess of liberty. This is one of the central concerns of the Jean Seznec's great book of 1940, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: the Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. We cannot make a facile distinction between the polytheism of the ancients and the artistic symbolism of the Renaissance: we often don't even know of ourselves whether we have in mind a concrete being, or rather an abstract ideal, principle, or emotion represented in the figure of a concrete being.

So I take it that in the Gospel of John what we are seeing is a stripping away of the symbolic dimensions of the social experience of God in order to lay bare the truth of the personal experience of God. And what we are left with is a sort of proof that is, in its own way, as forceful and incontrovertible as G. E. Moore's "Here is a hand, here is another hand..." It says, to distill the five steps down to the basic inference at their core: "Here is love, here is God..."

September 2, 2012

This is a tale I wrote in Sanskrit. It is my first composition in this language. It is severely constrained by what I am able to say, and even what I am able to say I can only say in a halting and mistake-ridden way. And yet, somehow I am pleased with it. I experience my beginner status as a sort of formal constraint, almost Oulipian in the way it binds my expressive power to rules that are not of my own choosing and that make the resulting composition something completely different from a free play of the imagination. The goal then is to express something meaningful, and ideally even interesting, within these constraints. There's more I want to say about this project of learning Sanskrit, and about the new reflections on language learning in general that it has stimulated. But for now I'll just post the tale. (Corrections from more advanced Sanskritists will be humbly taken and appreciated.)

Once there was a stone. This stone had no feet, no eyes, no ears, fur, or face. It could not move, could not breath, could not eat, could not do anything at all. But this stone had a soul. It was very unhappy. One day a bird landed on it. The bird immediately sensed that the stone was alive. It said: "Hey, stone! What's with you? Stones are only non-living things." The stone replied: "What a pity! I don't know what's with me. I am a stone. I cannot move. I cannot breath. I cannot eat. I cannot do anything at all. I am only a thing. It is not for me to live. I do not even know why I am the subject of this story." The bird said: "Don't worry about it. Moving is not so wonderful. And I'm always hungry. Your life is easy. You just have to think and meditate. The earth is your wife. Thoughts are your food. What a nice life." With these words the bird flew away. The stone was again alone. It was happy. It embraced its wife and had a meal. Having eaten, it went to sleep and dreamt of flying.

May 4, 2012

I don't know why all these racists are worried about Caucasians being reduced to a minority in Georgia as a result of demographic shifts. In fact it's logically certain that Caucasians will always be the majority in Georgia: if one is Georgian, ipso facto one is Caucasian.

Oh wait. I thought we were talking about that other Georgia. Because when I say 'Caucasian', I intend it as an adjective that refers to the land and peoples between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The origins of the use of this adjective as an umbrella term for so-called white people are rooted, it seems, in the Ottoman slave trade. Thus in 1684 François Bernier reports having been to a slave market in Constantinople. He is spellbound by the ivory beauty of a Circassian (presumably Georgian) slave girl. He notes that women from the Caucasus region have been praised since antiquity as the palest and most beautiful slave girls in all the world, and he regrets not having enough money to buy her.

Phenotypically, the girl Bernier desired was most likely very similar to, say, the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov: blonde-haired, blue-eyed, yet for all that something altogether different from what, say, an Atlanta Republican maven has in mind when she imagines of herself that she is a 'Caucasian'.

A century later, Christoph Meiners would attempt to transform the designation into a natural kind: now Caucasians constituted, alongside 'Mongolians' and 'Negroes', one of the basic subtypes of humanity. The mountain region and its peoples came to stand in metonymically for a third or so of humanity. Who makes the cut has been a matter of much dispute over the centuries. For Blumenbach, Slavs were Mongolian, while Tatars (presumably because of their long presence in the extensive Caucasus region) were included as Caucasians.

The designation long served, as one of its principal raisons d'être, to ensure that Jews remained excluded from the fold, and any self-described member of the Caucasian race, if projected from the early 20th century to the early 21st and shown, say, an online dating profile that reads 'Race: Caucasian; Religion: Jewish', would take this as a straightforward contradiction. They would have been dead wrong, but that does not make us dead right. The sad fact is that the term, to the extent that it refers to anything other than the noble people of Georgia, Chechnya, and so on, functions simply as a way of dividing us off from them. For now, the us includes Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews but not, generally, Arabs and (most) Latin Americans. It is, in other words, as racist as the day it was coined. Though it excludes different groups in different eras, it exists for the sole purpose of exclusion.

Most Americans who describe themselves as Caucasians would likely be reluctant to include Kadyrov as one of their own, even if they were to learn that, on strictly technical grounds, he must count as Caucasian if anyone does. He is a Muslim, after all; he is bearded, wears a fez-like hat, is usually seen draped in ammunition, and would appear entirely out of place at your local Bed, Bath, & Beyond. But the original association of whiteness with the Caucasus appears to have been a sort of pre-racial Orientalism, which valued the beauty of the Caucasian slave girl in view of its exoticness. In other words, its object was a white person, but it was objectifying in exactly the same way the later fascination with, e.g., the Hottentot Venus would be.

So when the know-nothing North Carolina State Senator's wife, Jodie Brunstetter, says that gay marriage should be prohibited as a measure against the eventual elimination of the 'Caucasian' race, she should not just be condemned for homophobia, for the logical fallaciousness of supposing that if they weren't getting married gay people would be reproducing, and for the retrograde idea that races in themselves are anything worth conserving, as one might conserve Sumatran rhinoceroses. She should also be condemned for supposing that there is such a thing as the Caucasian race. There is not, and never has been.

Yet the reaction from progressive circles is to denounce Brunstetter for her homophobia and her sentimental attachment to the white race, while letting pass without notice, and even with explicit support, her identification of whiteness with Caucasianness. Or, alternatively, we find what appears to be utter confusion about the meaning of the latter term. Thus Erin Gloria Ryan asks in a post in Jezebel: "Does Jodie Brunstetter know that 'Caucasian' isn't synonymous with 'white people'?" And thus far I found myself thinking: yes! But then came the disappointment of reading on: "Caucasians," Ryan writes, "live in India, on the horn of Africa, the Middle East, and in South America. They're brown and white and black. What Mrs. Brunstetter means is 'Aryan'. You know, like what Hitler meant, but in America."

Here I confess I just don't know what Ryan means by 'Caucasian' (a complaint that cannot be made, at least, about what Brunstetter means). I suppose there might be some scattered Chechens and the like in the Horn of Africa, and they might show a variety of complexions. But if the term is not taken to refer to someone from that mountain region, then I really don't know what it could be referring to except to that folk-category often described, alternatively, as 'white people'.

Invoking that other sinister and so-flexible-as-to-be-meaningless category of 'Aryans' only confuses matters; it too was once a non-racial category, referring to a certain caste in a certain region that we don't think of today as having much to do with whiteness, which became racialized principally in Germany as a result of certain rather ungrounded philological and linguistic speculations (by contrast with the physical-anthropological speculations of Blumenbach et al. in which the parallel notion of 'Caucasians' developed).

Neither 'Aryan' (except in the case of ancient North India) nor 'Caucasian' (except in the case of the southern Urals) ever had any serious application to human biological or social reality, yet Ryan happily goes along with Brunstetter in speaking as if there really are such things. It's time to scrap this bit of 18th-century racial mythology.

April 3, 2011

I had wanted to use just one passage from Lessing's short essay in an article I am supposed to be writing on the way our moral commitments, or lack of them, towards animals flow from an ungrounded folk-ontology that equates kinds with individuals. I ended up translating the entire essay, and in doing so I've both stalled and complicated my own project. It was Lessing's final point, the one he arrives at through his 'sensibility' rather than through logical conclusions, with which I disagreed most, and wanted to use as a foil. But the middle paragraphs, with the various substitutions of, e.g., 'Nero', 'wolf', and 'priest', I think are very interesting, and do not leave much to object to. Anyway, the article is still to come. Here is Lessing's essay.

*

The great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons. What is to be learned from this? Is it an essential feature of fables, that the animals in them are elevated to the status of moral beings? Is this a device that shortens and eases the author’s intended point? Is it a usage that in fact has no real purpose, but that has been conserved in honor of the person who first invented it, if only because it is funny—quod risum movet? Or what is it?

In brief: that animals and other lesser creatures have language and reason is presupposed in fables. It is assumed, and should not at all be understand as miraculous. When I read in scripture, “Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam…” etc. (Numbers 22:28), I am reading something miraculous. But when I read in Aesop, “Back in the days when animals still spoke, the sheep said to its shepherd….,” it is quite evident that the fabulist does not wish to relate anything miraculous; but much more, rather, something that he supposes, with the permission of his reader, to have been perfectly in accordance with the common course of nature at that time.

And this is so easy to understand, I mean, that I should be ashamed to say anything more on the subject. I shall come rather at once to the true reason --or which I take to be true, anyway-- why the fabulist often finds animals more convenient than humans for his purposes. I place it in the widely known constancy of their characters. I suppose that it would also be easy to find an example in history in which this or that moral truth makes itself known. [But] will it be able to be recognized in the example by everyone, without exception, even by those who are unfamiliar with the cahracters of the people of interest here? Impossible! And how many people are so widely known in history that they need only to be mentioned so that at once the notion of the way of thinking that is particular to them, as well as of their other properties, is immediately awakened in everyone? In order thus to avoid circumstantial characterization, in which it is never more than doubtful whether it calls forth the same ideas in everyone, it was necessary to confine oneself to the reduced sphere of those beings about which we reliably know that even for the most ignorant people this [or that] idea corresponds to the mention of them, and no other. And since these creatures are in their nature completely unable to take on the role of free beings for themselves, we preferred to expand the boundaries of their nature, and made them able [to take on the roles of free beings], under certain presumptions of probability.

We hear ‘Britannicus and Nero’. How many of us know what we are hearing? Who was this one? Who the other? In what relations do they stand to one another? But then we hear: ‘the wolf and the lamb’, at once we all know what we are hearing, and we know in what relation the one stands to the other. These words, which straightaway awaken within us their particular images, convey the perceptual knowledge that is prevented by those names [Britannicus and Nero], through which even those to whom they are not unfamiliar nonetheless certainly do not think exactly the same thing. If here the fabulist is not able to rustle up any rational individuals who portray themselves in our faculty of imagination through the mere naming of them, it is still permitted to him, and he has recourse and right, to seek out their equivalents among the animals or among lesser creatures still. If in the fable of the wolf and the lamb we were to place Nero in place of the wolf, and Britannicus in place of the lamb, the fable at once would lose what had made it a fable for the entire human race. But if we put the giant and the troll in place of the lamb and the wolf, it already loses somewhat less, for the giant and the troll are also individuals whose characters are alreadly largely explained without further additions by their being mentioned. Or we can even transform it into the following human fable (2 Samuel 12): “A priest came to the poor man of the prophet and said: ‘Bring your white lamb before the altar, for the gods require a sacrifice’. The poor man replied: ‘my neighbor has a great herd, and I have only this one lamb’. ‘But you made a vow to the gods’, the priest replied, ‘for they blessed your fields’. ‘I have no field’, was the answer. ‘But that’s how it was before, when they healed your son of his illness’. ‘O,’ the poor man replied, ‘the gods took my son himself as a sacrifice!’ ‘You godless man!,’ the priest scolded, ‘You blaspheme!’ And he tore the lamb from his arms…” etc. And if in this transfomation the fable has lost still less, this arises simply from the fact that the character of avarice is unfortunately even more quickly associated with the word ‘priest’ than the character of blood-thirstiness with the word ‘giant’; and through the poor man of the prophet the idea of oppressed innocence is more easily awoken than through the troll.

Indeed, I would like to venture to ascribe yet another purpose to animals and other lesser creatures in fables, to which perhaps I never would have come through [logical] conclusions, if my sensibility had not brought me to it. The fable has as its aim our clear and vital recognition of a moral principle. Nothing obscures our recognition more than the passions. Consequently, the fabulist must avoid the excitation of the passions as much as possible. But how else can he avoid, for example, the arousal of sympathy, than by making the objects of it less perfect, and by putting animals or lesser creatures in place of men? Let us recall again the fable of the wolf and the lamb, as it was transformed above into the fable of the priest and the poor man of the prophet. We sympathize with the lamb, but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle. How is it by contrast with the poor man? Does it only seem so to me, or is it really true, that we have so much sympathy with him, and we feel much too much indignation against the priest, for the intuitive knowledge of the moral principle to be able to be nearly as clear as it is in the other case?